This is what it means to be a girl.

Should we be proud of our girls? Or should we not call them ‘girls’ at all. Picture: Phil HillyardSource:News Corp Australia

FEMALE athletes have been a part of the Olympic tradition for a whopping 116 years, since they first competed in the sufficiently ladylike lawn tennis at the Paris Games in 1900.

Yet somehow, with more than a century’s experience under their belts, sports commentators still don’t know how to talk about them.

In the past 10 days, we’ve seen the achievements of women athletes actively diminished by the world’s media. American Corey Cogdell-Unrein won bronze in the trap shooting only to be reported in the press by reference to her famous husband.

Yet despite all these undeniably sexist incidents of reporting, there’s one question that continues to preoccupy the media echo chamber.

Is it OK to call adult women “girls”?

Coverage of the Olympics in Rio has seen sports commentators both angrily criticised and vigorously defended for referring to Australia’s female athletes as “girls”. It’s a semantic debate that’s drawing attention away from the more pressing challenges in women’s sport.

So let’s settle it once and for all, shall we?

From movies to books to social media, calling adult women “girls” is pretty standard. This isn’t only an issue for sport. On The Bachelor, the 20-odd female contestants vying for love are collectively called “girls”. The term reinforces their position of powerlessness; they’re delicate and in desperate need of male protection.

While on reality television it’s merely irritating, in the workplace it’s sexist and even harmful to call grown women “girls”. When we label a female colleague or employee a “girl”, we professionally and intellectually diminish her contribution. A girl is someone incapable of taking responsibility for herself let alone her work. A girl is a child.

So what does this mean for our women Olympians? For them, the pool or the track or the field is their place of work. It’s a professional context like any other. Does that make calling Australia’s gold medal-winning rugby sevens team “girls” sexist? What if that’s how the players choose to refer to themselves? Is sport different?

Feminist author Caitlin Moran says you can tell if something is sexist by asking, “Are the men doing it?” And in the sporting arena the answer is yes. The men are doing it. Commentators and fans call male athletes “boys” or “lads” all the time.

It’s a way of expressing shared ownership in their achievements, on behalf of the fans. The sport-watching public is proud of their nation’s representatives, the same way a parent might be proud of their children.

In this context, the term “girls” is less about sexism and more an intuitive recognition of what sport is: fun. Sport is about taking pleasure in physical activity and the joy that comes from testing the very limits of human physicality. The Olympics is quite literally about playing games. And what could be more childlike than that?

I asked a friend who once represented Australia in basketball whether she and her teammates were offended by being called “girls”. Her response? “We were mostly just grateful when people were talking about us at all.”

Which brings me back to the debate we actually need to be having and the area where the media, in particular, needs to take a good hard look at itself.

The immediate challenge facing women’s sport is not whether we call athletes “girls” but the woeful extent to which they’re discussed at all. Outside of the Olympics, attendance at women’s sporting events is depressingly low. The salaries (if they even exist) of professional female athletes are rarely enough to live on. Women’s sport is shockingly underreported.

The media dedicates more hours to horse racing than it does to the totality of women’s sporting events. And when women’s sport is reported on? We do a totally rubbish job of it.

Kim Brennan, Catherine Skinner, Maddison Keeney, Anabelle Smith, the Campbell sisters, Jessica Fox, Anna Meares, the Matildas, the Hockeyroos, the Opals and those magnificent rugby sevens. Like their compatriots around the world, these women are strong, fast and incredibly dedicated.

Their skills and abilities deserve our respect and their achievements are worthy of genuine attention and fair reporting. Not sexist claptrap about how they look or who they’re married to.

These women are warriors.

And if they’re “girls” as well? Then that makes being a girl a glorious thing.

THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A GIRL. Picture: John Macdougall / AFP PhotoSource:AFP

Jamila Rizvi is a writer, presenter and news.com.au columnist. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.